Jennifer Weiner

Maybe love was a myth anyhow, a brew of hormones and fantasy, evolution's way of getting men and women together long enough for them to procreate,back in the day when girls got pregnant at twelve, were pregnant or nursing for the next twenty years, and were dead of the plague by forty.

mooo," she said... "I mean mmmm," she moaned. Louder this time. Goddamn Dr. Seuss is ruining my sex life.

The condom broke. I know how stupid that sounds. It's the reproductive version of the dog ate my homework.

I had started on the marriage and motherhood beat by accident with a post on my personal, read only by friends, blog called __ifty Shades of Men_. I had written it after buying Fifty Shades of Grey to spice up what Dave and I half-jokingly called our grown up time, and had written a meditation on how the sex wasn__ the sexiest part of the book. __ear publishers, I will tell you why every woman with a ring on her finger and a car seat in her SUV is devouring this book like the candy she won__ let herself eat._ I had written. __t__ not the fantasy of an impossibly handsome guy who can give you an orgasm just by stroking your nipples. It is instead the fantasy of a guy who can give you everything. Hapless, clueless, barely able to remain upright without assistance, Ana Steele is that unlikeliest of creatures, a college student who doesn__ have an email address, a computer, or a clue. Turns out she doesn__ need any of those things. Here is the dominant Christian Grey and he__l give her that computer plus an iPad, a beamer, a job, and an identity, sexual and otherwise. No more worrying about what to wear. Christian buys her clothes. No more stress about how to be in the bedroom. Christian makes those decisions. For women who do too much__hich includes, dear publishers, pretty much all the women who have enough disposable income to buy your books__his is the ultimate fantasy: not a man who will make you come, but a man who will make agency unnecessary, a man who will choose your adventure for you.

This thing that I created, this thing I made as a woman, for other women, is worth something. It's worth exactly the same as what a similar thing, built by a man, for men, is worth.

Maybe it was inertia -or worse, fear- that was keeping me in the same place.

Money is a tremendous advantage in just about everything, but in terms of reproduction, if you're a poor woman and you are infertile, it's like too bad, so sad. And if you are a wealthy woman, you can kind of buy whatever you want.

If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?

Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you up in the morning.

Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college.

Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.

It was high school. Evil is kind of the name of the game.

Sometimes I wish it has been you.

I'm saying that it's a big decision. Your first love is important. It's part of your story The story you'll tell yourself, the one you'll tell about yourself, for the rest of your life.

First of all, it's life. You don't win.

Your friends will still be your friends, if they're good friends.

I don't answer. I shut my eyes and hold my breath and hope whoever it is will think I'm not here and go home.

Rose leaned against the bathroom door. Here it was _ her real life, the truth of who she was, barreling down on her like a bus with bad brakes. Here was the truth _ she wasn__ the kind of person Jim could fall in love with. She wasn__ what she__ made herself out to be _ a cheerful, uncomplicated girl, a normal girl with a happy, orderly life, a girl who wore pretty shoes and had nothing more pressing on her mind that whether ER was a rerun this week. The truth was in the exercise tape she didn__ have time to unwrap, let alone exercise to; the truth was her hairy legs and ugly underwear. Most of all, the truth was her sister, her gorgeous, messed-up, fantastically unhappy and astoundingly irresponsible sister.